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Syria Crisis and Putin’s Return Chill U.S. Ties With Russia

WASHINGTON — Sitting beside President Obama this spring, the president of Russia gushed that “these were perhaps the best three years of relations between Russia and the United States over the last decade.” Two and a half months later, those halcyon days of friendship look like a distant memory.

Gone is Dmitri A. Medvedev, the optimistic president who collaborated with Mr. Obama and celebrated their partnership in March. In his place is Vladimir V. Putin, the grim former K.G.B. colonel whose return to the Kremlin has ushered in a frostier relationship freighted by an impasse over Syria and complicated by fractious domestic politics in both countries.

The back-and-forth this week over Russian support for Syria’s government as it tries to crush an uprising underscored the limits of Mr. Obama’s ability to “reset” ties with Moscow. He signed an arms control treaty with Mr. Medvedev, expanded supply lines to Afghanistan through Russian territory, secured Moscow’s support for sanctions on Iran and helped bring Russia into the World Trade Organization. But officials in both capitals noted this week that the two countries still operated on fundamentally different sets of values and interests.

The souring relations come as Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin are preparing to meet for the first time as presidents next week on the sidelines of a summit meeting in Mexico. With Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, saying Wednesday that Mr. Obama’s Russia policy “has clearly failed,” and Mr. Putin stoking anti-American sentiment in response to street protests in Moscow, the Mexico meeting may be a test of whether the reset has run its course.

“We were already at a place with the Russians where we were about to move to a new phase,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama. “A lot of this is can we continue to build on the initial steps we’ve taken with the Russians even as we’ve had differences emerge, most notably on Syria.”

Others see the situation more pessimistically. “There is a crisis in the Russian-American relationship,” said Aleksei K. Pushkov, the hawkish head of Russia’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee. “It is a crisis when the sides have to balance their interests but they cannot do so because their interests diverge. It is developing into some kind of long-term mistrust.”

Signs of that divergence seem increasingly pronounced lately, despite private reassurances from Mr. Putin that he wants to deepen ties. Michael A. McFaul, a former Russia adviser to Mr. Obama, has been subjected to an unusual campaign of public harassment since arriving in Moscow as ambassador. A Russian general threatened pre-emptive strikes against American missile defense sites in Poland in the event of a crisis. Mr. Putin has cracked down on demonstrations while blaming Americans for them, and he skipped the Group of 8 summit meeting hosted by Mr. Obama last month.

“The reset failed to change the underlying suspicion and distrust of America shared by a majority of Russians as well as Putin himself,” said Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “America is seen as a threat, an agent seeking to undermine Russia, to weaken it, to do harm to it. Russia always has to be on the alert, on the defensive.”

Adding to the tension have been moves in Congress to block visas and freeze assets of Russians implicated in human rights abuses. The bipartisan legislation, named for Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer whose corruption investigation led to his death in prison, passed a House committee last week and will be taken up by a Senate panel next week.

“I see this as part of an effort to make clear the expected international conduct as it relates to human rights,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, a Maryland Democrat sponsoring the legislation. “This is what friends do. We point out when you need to do better.”

Photo

Supporters of the Free Syrian Army protesting in Homs last month against Syrian and Russian leaders, including President Bashar al-Assad and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov.Credit
Robert King/Polaris

The Obama administration, seeking to avoid a rupture, opposes the bill on the grounds that the State Department has already banned visas for Russians implicated in Mr. Magnitsky’s death.

Instead, the administration is highlighting legislation introduced on Tuesday to repeal decades-old trade restrictions on Russia known as Jackson-Vanik.

On Tuesday, hours after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton accused Russia of supplying attack helicopters to Syria, she sent an under secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, to a Russia Day reception at the Russian Embassy in Washington, where she pointed to the proposed Jackson-Vanik repeal and talked about “mutual respect,” with no explicit mention of Syria.

The complication for Mr. Obama is that lawmakers like Mr. Cardin and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, want to link the Jackson-Vanik repeal to the Magnitsky legislation, angering Russian officials, who were shocked to learn that the White House apparently cannot block it. Mr. Putin was already upset at even the administration’s mild criticism of his domestic crackdown; Mr. Pushkov said the Kremlin viewed that to “not be very loyal.”

Mr. Obama is focusing on enlisting Russia’s help on issues like stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons. The next round of talks between Iran and international powers opens in Moscow next week, and the administration hopes that Russia’s role as host will prompt it to use its influence with Tehran to extract more concessions.

One of the biggest successes of the reset, however, has also made the United States more dependent on Russia. With Pakistan cutting off supply lines to Afghanistan, the so-called northern distribution network through Russia is the primary reinforcement route for America’s war on the Taliban.

“We need more from them than they need from us at the moment,” said Angela E. Stent, director of Russian studies at Georgetown University. The Russians are less invested than Mr. Obama in the notion of a reset. “They look at that as an American course correction. But it’s not their policy, it’s an American policy,” Ms. Stent said.

Publicly, the administration rejects any connection between Syria and the Afghan supply route. But, privately, officials worry that Russia will try to use the leverage provided by the supply route.

So far, Russian officials have reassured their American counterparts that they will not. If anything, Moscow worries that the United States is pulling out of Afghanistan too soon, fearing a security collapse near Russia’s southern flank.

For Mr. Obama, who considers improved ties with Russia one of his signature accomplishments, the question is whether the current friction is temporary or is a sign that the reset has accomplished what it can.

The coming meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico, could prove uncomfortable for Mr. Obama. The first time the two men met, in July 2009, when Mr. Putin was prime minister, Mr. Putin delivered an hourlong harangue about the United States.

“The president’s going to be yearning for the days of meetings with Dima,” said David J. Kramer, an official in the George W. Bush administration, using Mr. Medvedev’s nickname. “It probably won’t be a pretty meeting. And it shouldn’t be a pretty meeting.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 14, 2012, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: As Putin Returns and Syria Boils, U.S.-Russia Ties Sour. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe